Wednesday August 20, 2014
6:30 a.m.

Little to say this morning in Cebu. Same cast of characters out on the streets: the crazy homeless men; the scary, nutty prostitutes; people waiting for jeepneys to get to work with knapsacks on their chests to thwart the pickpockets; students with their ID cards around their necks. A small pleasure while in Asia is reading the funny English signs. One sign I see everywhere is a notice that you need an official ID to enter this or that doorway. But over time, they kept shortening the message. Now, they all read “No ID Entry”. It’s hard to figure out what that means, but taken literally it implies that only people WITHOUT proper ID can enter. If you have ID, you can’t enter. This ID business is part of the strong concern for security. I still often do not go into places because I get tired of the searches and the men with guns. I went to a Buddhist temple yesterday, and I almost didn’t go in because I saw a security logbook at the one small entrance that was open. The main entrances were closed and chained – as always. But the security guard must have been taking a break because he wasn’t there. And because he was absent, I went inside to check out the temple. Had he been sitting there, I probably wouldn’t have bothered even though I’d walked for a long time specifically to see this temple. Once I was inside, the guard returned and I ended up staying inside the temple much longer than I would have normally simply because I was annoyed that I’d now have to deal with him on my way out and sign his register. It’s always the small things that annoy me in life. In this case, it wasn’t the time it would take to sign the register that bothered me. The problem was that I was sweating so badly from the hot sun. This happens all the time. And when I try to sign these registers, my hand is shaking from the heat and the general effort of walking around, etc. Worse, my arm is soaking wet with sweat and I end up soaking the paper and blotting all the ink and making a big mess. These registers are also very poorly designed and don’t have enough space for the information they request. I hate forms like that. I suppose I should count my blessings that they don’t ask for official ID. The temple itself was underwhelming. An equivalent temple in Taiwan would be beautiful and interesting and full of hundreds of people. This temple looked more like a plaster fake that you’d find in a theme park – and a very old fake at that. It was falling apart. And there was no one there at all. I was the only visitor – a dumb tourist with a camera. There were no Buddhists there to pray or make offerings. I miss those temples from Taiwan. There was so much life there. The one interesting aspect of my visit was that I could climb up two or three levels inside the temple and get a view over some of the surrounding neighborhood. This temple had been built beside a small river, and that afforded me good views of all the slum housing beside the river. That’s a given in this part of the world. Rivers mean slums and garbage. I took two pictures in total – one of a group of jumbled dwellings in this small slum and a second of a couple of tall buildings. While I was taking the picture, I noticed ziplines connecting the two buildings at the very top. That reminded me of an adventure tourism show about Cebu that I saw a couple of years ago. In the show, the young traveller did all the exciting things one can do in Cebu including zip lining between those two buildings. He gave the expected “Yahoo!” and all that while he zipped across. I had forgotten about that zip line until I saw it yesterday. Tourism in the Philippines is closely linked with zip lines. They love them and stick them wherever they can.

2:00 p.m.

Some midday rambles. After breakfast this morning, I hopped on the bike with the goal of riding up into the hills near Cebu and visiting a well-known Taoist temple. Not surprisingly, things did not work out as expected. Nor was it easy.

It started with simply getting ready for the trip. I wanted to bring my camera and a couple of lenses, and recently that has turned into a bit of a chore. I’ve just lost track of my camera gear. While in Cebu, I purchased a circular polarizer and a bunch of adapter rings. I needed the adapter rings because I couldn’t get filters to fit my lens sizes. On top of that, I had to get extra lens caps. So that essentially doubled all the bits and pieces I have to carry with me, and I need different adapters and lens caps for different lenses. I have no easy way to carry this stuff, and it gets very confusing. Switching lenses or putting on the polarizer filter is a very complicated process now. Drives me crazy and reinforces the idea that I should have simply picked up an entry level DSLR with the kit zoom and one prime. This Olympus set-up is simply too complicated for my current needs. It fit me perfectly while I was in Taiwan and going out and doing photography every weekend and then editing the photos at my leisure on my home computer. It’s a whole different situation on the bike.

Anyway, I got all my camera gear and everything else organized and set off. Traffic was brutal. It’s a horrible city to ride a bike in. It was also brutally hot. The sun was out and beating down like an angry furnace. It never ceases to amaze me that something 93 million miles away can hit me with such force. I had tried once before long ago to get to this temple and failed. The streets here are insane. They are poorly laid out and they have few street signs. What street signs you find may or may not be accurate. There are super old signs, somewhat old signs, and new signs. And you never know which ones you are looking at, and the names of the streets have changed over time. Anyway, I plotted my route on my map and guessed at the way to go. I quickly found myself on a set of extremely steep mountain roads. Road grades here are far steeper than anywhere else I’ve been and riding a bike up them is challenging. I ended up with sweat pouring down my face. Of course, I quickly got extremely lost. I just kept going, however. Being lost didn’t really bother me. I wasn’t that interested in the temple. It was just a random destination, and the journey to get there was more the point. If I never found it, and I found something else instead, that was fine with me.

The thing I found instead turned out to be the Cebu City Zoo. I rode right past it at first. Zoos in Asia are very depressing, and I wasn’t interested in being depressed. However, I decided to take a quick look anyway, and I turned around. That turned out to be a good decision because it started to rain heavily off and on and I could find shelter in the zoo.

Two school buses were parked outside the zoo, and the kids and their teachers or parents were just leaving as I arrived. There was no place to park my bicycle, but the young guys at the zoo were quite friendly, and they opened the gates and let me roll my bike inside and lock it up. That was rare, as most places treat my bicycle as a lethal weapon. It’s an extremely unusual form of transportation here, and people don’t know how to handle it. Most of the time, they lump it in with motorcycles. Bikes have two wheels and motorcycles have two wheels, so they treat them the same. And when motorcycles are banned, they ban bicycles, too. Or charge fees for them. I find that very annoying.

The entrance fee for the zoo was quite reasonable at 25 pesos (about sixty-five cents), though they had to enter my full name and address and contact number onto the receipt. That’s also very common here. Every few days, I have to empty my wallet of the constant flow of receipts for fees and such things. They love to have official forms and fill them out.

The zoo was a very strange one, perhaps the strangest I’ve ever seen. I wouldn’t even call it a zoo. It was more like a small garbage dump dressed up to look like a park with a few nasty iron cages with some forlorn animals in them. The surprising thing was how accessible the animals were. I was busy locking up my bicycle against a low stone wall, when I noticed a sign on the wall. I read it and it said something about the “Black Ape” and how it was very rare and almost extinct, etc. I was wondering why in the world the sign was sitting right there, but then I looked up and a small black ape was sitting on a wooden beam right above my head. It was just there out in the open and staring at me. It could have reached down and smacked me on the nose or something. It was restrained, though. It was wearing a full body harness and a rope was attached to the harness. Still, it was quite free to move around.

Behind me and right beside the main entrance were some large wooden crates. The young guys who worked at the zoo were all sitting on these crates and chatting and laughing. When all the kids and their teachers reached them, they got up, opened the crates, and pulled out a couple of very large snakes. I’m pretty sure they were pythons. The largest was perhaps fifteen feet long. Its body was as thick as my leg in the middle. I couldn’t guess at its weight, but it took two of the guys to lift it, and when they placed it around the neck of the teachers for a photo op, the legs of some of the teachers buckled. They couldn’t support the weight of the snake.

The snake seemed undisturbed by all this attention as it was lifted from neck to neck and subjected to the squeals and screams of fright. It just looked around and sniffed with its tongue. However, I imagined that over time, the snake would be heavily stressed by all this handling and would likely die. I don’t know that for a fact, but certainly a python’s normal day does not include constant photo ops. With that in mind, I refused when they offered to drape the snake over my neck. They probably thought I was afraid of the snake, but I just didn’t want to bother the poor thing. I had the “python over the neck” experience once in my life already, and I don’t need to do it again.

Once I got my bike locked up and secured, I got out my camera and went into the zoo. To my surprise, the first animals I came across after the pythons and the black ape were five hawks. They were sitting on poles and just staring at me. I was as startled to see them as I was to see the black ape. They weren’t in cages or anything like that but just sitting on five-foot-tall poles. I could walk right up to them and examine them and take a picture. They didn’t seem to mind. One of the young workers came by and asked me if I wanted to hold the hawk – I assume by having it perch on my arm. To be honest, I really would have liked that, just as, deep down, I would have loved to have a python draped around my neck. Again, however, I felt that it wouldn’t do the hawks any good. I’m sure they had been kidhandled like crazy by the children who had just left, and I didn’t want to annoy them any further just for my entertainment. I don’t know if I was being absurd, but that’s how I felt. The zoo worker didn’t care one way or the other. When I turned down the offer to handle the hawks, he asked me if I was interested in a massage. I can’t even guess what that offer meant or how said massage would materialize if I’d said yes. Let’s forget that I was absolutely drenched and dripping in sweat and grime from my 9-km ride up into the hills and that it was extremely hot and that we were in the middle of this garbage dump disguised as a zoo. Did they have a nice massage parlor hidden behind the python crates? No idea. In any event, I turned that offer down, too.

There wasn’t much else to see at the zoo, and I took in the exhibits rather quickly – a cage of pigeons, some other hawks, some civets, a glass case filled with snakes, a few turtles, an assortment of crocodiles, and, most sad of all, two dogs in rusting iron cages. Saying that the dogs were the most sad is saying something, as all the exhibits were exceedingly sad. The civets were beautiful animals, but they were kept in separate cages made of chicken wire. Rather than run from me when I approached, they all came to the chicken wire and looked out at me expectantly. They all paced back and forth in the limited space they had. They were clearly hungry and were hoping that I had brought food. That was the pattern for all the animals except for the snakes and crocodiles. They all came up to me and opened their mouths or otherwise begged for food. The pens and cages were about what you’d expect – crude and rusty and dirty and old. The weirdest and worst were the dogs. I have no idea why they had two dogs. They were kept in separate cages quite a ways apart. The cages were quite small, and the dogs clearly just lay on the iron bar floor 24 hours a day and that’s it. There was nothing else for them to do. Are they slightly better off than street dogs left to starve on the streets? Probably. But that isn’t saying much. At least street dogs can run around and enjoy their freedom and the company of other dogs. Plus, the street dogs I see here are largely in good health. They are nothing like the poor mutts one sees in Taiwan.

The weirdest animal prize, however, goes to the largest of the crocodile. This was a scary and quite large fellow. The weird thing about him was that his jaw was extremely short and pushed up on a sharp angle. My guess was that as a young crocodile he was kept in a very small cage and quickly grew too large for it and his jaw became deformed. I suppose it could be a congenital defect, but I don’t know. There were some other crocodiles in other pens – a couple of dozen all packed together with barely enough room to move. But this deformed one was eight or nine times larger and in a pen by himself. Crocodiles are certainly scary creatures. That scariness comes from the way they are completely motionless. It’s clear there isn’t a single thought in their ancient brain. It’s all instinct, and if you happened to dangle a tasty arm or leg near their mouth, the instinct would kick in and they’d snap it up and tear it off. Till then, they don’t move a muscle. It would be impossible to tell the difference between a real crocodile and a well-crafted statue. They would both be equally motionless. The pythons, at least, breathed. You could tell they were alive by the slow bulging of their bodies as they breathed. It was impossible to see any breathing movement in the crocodiles. Here, too, I was offered the chance to touch the crocodiles. I declined that offer as well. I felt like a wimp for turning down all these offers, but I wasn’t in the mood to hassle these poor animals. I suppose if I’d worn a two-hundred-pound python as a necklace, let five hawks perch on my arms, got a massage, and pet a crocodile, I’d have had a more interesting visit to the Cebu City Zoo, but I did none of those things.

When I left the zoo, I was asked to fill out a register and write some comments. I did not write what I actually felt. I just wrote that I liked the civets and the big, old crocodile the best. I really did like the civets. Gorgeous animals.

When I left the zoo, I learned that the Taoist temple was not that far away. Just a short distance up the hill from the zoo was a turn-off into the ritzy Beverly Hills area, and that was where the temple was located. (Yes, in the Philippines the rich people call their exclusive neighborhoods things like Beverly Hills.) I found the road, but my way was blocked by a gate and two armed security guards. The guards were quite friendly and they told me that the Taoist temple was nearby. Unfortunately, the homeowners had enacted a policy banning bicycles. I wasn’t quite sure about this, but it appeared that I could walk my bicycle, but I wasn’t allowed to ride it. For less than a second, I was on the fence about whether I would just go along with this idiocy or make a stink. The problem was that according to my map, the temple was still a fair distance away, and I did not want to walk my bike all the way there. How stupid is that? What’s wrong with a bicycle, for Pete’s sake? Are they that dangerous and annoying? Well, I eventually came down on the side of making a stink, and I asked these guards why they had this policy banning bicycles. Like security guards and police all over the world, they just kept repeating that it was their policy. I told them that I understood that. I wanted to know the reason behind the policy. What was wrong with bicycles? They had no idea what the reason was. They only knew that it was a policy and they had to enforce it. I was not allowed to ride my bicycle into the hallowed neighborhood of Beverly Hills inhabited by the rich people. The guards got out their big book and were going to have me register and sign in and all that, and I told them to forget it. If that was their policy, I wasn’t going to visit the temple. One of the guards said that if that was my choice, then that was my choice. I told him that it wasn’t my choice. It was their decision to stop me from visiting the temple. It was their choice, not mine. The guard then said that he hoped I understood. And I told him that no, I did not understand because they didn’t even understand and couldn’t explain to me why bicycles were banned. If they could give me a reason, then I could understand. They just said again that it was their policy. I rode away with the temple unvisited. I wasn’t torn up about it. The zoo was a much more interesting experience than the temple would have been, so it had been a good outing.

Things got a bit more complicated after that because I somehow got turned around on my way back down out of the hills and got completely lost. It started to rain heavily again, and I was struggling to keep dry as I tried desperately to find my way out of the hills. The problem was that it wasn’t a very simple matter to test different directions. At every turn, I was faced with long and steep climbs. Running into another dead end after a long climb was tiring and frustrating. This went on for a long time, and then by pure chance, I found myself at the far end of Beverly Hills below the Taoist temple. I could see it high up on the hills now above me. Just to wrap up the experience, I decided to try to get in through this new gate with my bicycle. Maybe they had a different policy down at the bottom. It turned out that this gate at the bottom was the main entrance into Beverly Hills, and these guards were much more official and more severe with their policies than the ones at the top. I asked first if the Taoist temple was in this area, and they said it was, but, they pointed out quickly, I was not allowed to ride my bicycle past their gate. They wouldn’t even let me walk my bicycle. I would have to leave my bicycle in a parking lot nearby and go on foot. They were quick to assure me that my bicycle would be safe, but I wasn’t about to take their word for that. I asked these guards for the reason behind the policy, but their brains were equally incapable of grasping that line of reasoning. They just kept repeating that it was the policy. They got out their big register book for me to write down all my personal info, and they were quite surprised when I waved it away. I told them that I wasn’t going to visit the temple. They asked why, and I said that I had ridden my bicycle all the way up here from Cebu to visit this temple, and I wasn’t going to leave it in this parking lot to be stolen. I told them that I didn’t like their policy. They were completely unfazed by this, and they asked me where I was from. When I told them I was from Canada, they went on a long song-and-dance about how wonderful Canada was and how everyone there was rich. I hear that a lot. Partially as a joke, I said that we didn’t have rich people in Canada like these rich people here – with their own security guards and their own “policy” banning bicycles.

I don’t know if I sound like a dick in this story, but I wasn’t acting like a dick at all. These guards were very friendly and I was very friendly in return. I just told them straight up that their policy was unreasonable and because of that policy, I would not be visiting the temple. And I refused to be polite and reassure them that I understood and everything was fine. I just told them that I didn’t understand and it wasn’t fine. It was a stupid policy. I do that a lot these days. I don’t seem to have as much patience as I used to have. When things are stupid, I push back a little bit and speak my mind. I think it’s because I see the Filipinos being so passive and not resisting at all. And I see this terrible process going on here – the same process that is going on in Canada and the United States with everyone becoming afraid and putting in place more and more security measures. These security measures are supposed to keep everyone safe, but what they don’t realize is that they are slowly building their own prisons. The people in Beverly Hills are living in their own prison. They paid for the prison! They hired the guards and put in the gates and have meetings to come up with all the rules. And in the end, they are the ones that have to constantly stop at these gates and show their residential IDs and passes in order to go in and out of their own homes! It’s insane, but that is what is going on. They are building their own prisons around them. And this is happening all over the world.

Riding back into Cebu was even tougher than going out. Jeepneys are the worst vehicles on the road in the entire world. I happened to pass a bicycle shop, and I popped in to take a look around. I’m always hoping to just stumble across some magical bike shop that carries all kinds of great odds and ends that would be useful for a bike like mine. So far no luck. This bike shop was pretty high end and catered to those looking for racing bikes and expensive mountain bikes. But they had nothing in the way of bike mirrors, water bottles, rear lights, or anything like that. One of my mirrors was smashed during the typhoon, and I still haven’t been able to replace it. My rear light was also destroyed during the typhoon, and I haven’t been able to replace it. I’m still surprised at the total lack of interest when I go into these bike shops. I know that if I were working in a bike shop in Canada and some guy came in and he was clearly from another country and was bike touring, I’d ask him questions and go check out his bike and all the modifications he may or may not have made. But here, no one is interested at all. I think these bicycle shop clerks are simply there to work the cash registers and sell things. They have no interest in bikes.

Tags: Beverly Hills, bike touring, Philippines Bike Trip 2013, Taiwan, temple